Going to bed with something worrying you is a recipe for a terrible night’s sleep. You’ll spend half the night lying awake with thousands of thoughts running through your head. The next morning you wake up tired and irritable.
At work, you can’t get to every task because you’re exhausted. You go home worrying that you didn’t do everything, and you go to bed anxious again. This is how the vicious cycle begins.
Why does anxiety peak in the evening?
One of the most obvious reasons for this is that your mind is less preoccupied as the day winds down. Those things that make you anxious have been on the back burner all day. But now that your brain isn’t so active, in they creep again.
How anxiety disrupts your sleep patterns
Some of the symptoms of anxiety explain why there’s no way you can go to sleep when you’re feeling anxious. Nausea, heart palpitations, sweating, and crying will keep you wide awake. A lot of people feel dizziness, trembling, and tingling when they’re anxious.
Experiencing only one of these is going to cause you to lose some sleep. They seldom come alone, and you might have three or four symptoms at one time.
Managing anxiety so you can get a good night’s sleep
It may sound oversimplified, but you need to examine what is making you anxious. When you’ve established what it is, you can set about gaining some control over it.
Here are some examples:
- Being hacked
The stories of people having their devices hacked and their identities stolen are frightening. More and more people are worried that their home network isn’t safe and that hackers might attack while they’re asleep.
How to put it to bed:
Add an extra layer of security to your home network by having a Virtual Private Network (VPN). There are several options available. Choose the best VPN for Mac, Windows, Android, etc. by doing some research.
- Demands at work
Work is the leading cause of stress in the world. And stress is the leading cause of anxiety and sleeplessness. Work is stressful. Very few people don’t experience stress when it comes to their jobs. Targets, deadlines, and long to-do lists dominate your life.
How to put it to bed:
If you’re overwhelmed by how many things you must do at work, don’t go to bed without having a plan of action for the next day. You’ll get a better night’s sleep, and it beats floundering around the office the next day.
- Relationships
Our interactions with our family, friends, and co-workers can cause a lot of stress. Any discord in your relationships with others will make you anxious and keep you awake at night. Worrying about an argument or obsessing over an apology you’re owed but will never get cheats you out of your much-deserved sleep.
How to put it to bed:
Conflict is normal. How you manage it can make a difference between it affecting your sleep or not. Deal with conflict head-on in a calm, constructive way. Bottling your emotions up will only make your anxiety worse.
- Things over which you have no control
You have no control over traffic and the weather. However, many people lie awake at night worrying their commute the next working. Others lie in bed listening to the rain and worrying that there’s going to be flooding.
How to put it to bed:
These triggers are not easy to control because you have no control over them. As hard as it is, you must accept that what will be will be. Don’t catastrophize and assume the worst. If you do, you’ll never get any sleep.
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